Why Some Cocktail Bars Feel Right and Others Don’t

What a 10,000-word study of Japanese bartending can teach us about the fine line between ritual and reinvention

I love it whenever someone much smarter than me puts the commonplace under the microscope of their academic discipline — especially anthropologists and sociologists. They stand on the shoulders of previous generations of scholars, which gives them a towering perspective from which to view something anew. Through their lens, what seems like an amorphous splodge of random life suddenly develops a sharp, crystalline structure. Your trip to the grocery story to pick up some Slim Jims? It’s a case study in heuristics.

Which is by way of mentioning that I recently came across a research paper published in the journal Advances in Strategic Management titled “Disrupting Tradition: Reshaping Traditional Bartending in Japan.” It was written by Nao Sato of Kyoto University and published last year. It’s a rather long (nearly 10,000-word) study examining the evolution of the century-long history of Japanese bartending.

At the jargon-filled heart of the study is a concept called the “tradition-innovation paradox.” Here, I’ve boiled the precepts down then further simplified it by asking AI to enshrine it in the style of a corporate motivational poster:

That is, an organization that leans too heavily on tradition will find its ship slowly sailing into the doldrums of stagnation and irrelevance. If it abandons tradition and too eagerly embraces innovation, it may find itself unmoored, with its identity and credibility adrift. The trick is to deftly navigate between the two.

So: the Catholic Church finally permits services in languages other than Latin. And hip-hop artists sample hits of the past. Both stay tethered to tradition while exploring new formats.

Sato, who worked in a traditional Japanese bar for four years and interviewed 26 bartenders for his study, outlines the rise of the “authentic Japanese bar,” which has roots around 1900 and became institutionalized in the postwar period. The style was homogenized largely thanks to the oversight of the Japan Bartenders’ Association (later renamed the Nippon Bartenders’ Association). The typical “authentic bar” was small (between one and ten counter seats), and while some had table seating, the bar served as the stage.

Bartenders wore formal jackets or waistcoats and labored over every detail, from measuring exact portions to cutting ice to selecting liquor brands. “Moreover, they consider the process of making drinks and their bodily movement a significant part of bartending,” Sato writes. “The making process seems like a ritual, often compared to the Japanese tea ceremony.”

Customers were an integral part of the ritual and had their own script to follow. “These include guidelines such as not taking a seat until directed by the bartender, refraining from asking for recommendations, consuming short cocktails within 20 minutes, avoiding loud conversations, and seeking permission before taking photos, among others.”

In the past decade or two, thanks in large part to the internet, global influences have flooded Japan and a new style of bartending has emerged. Sato was interested in how the old traditions carried over — or didn’t. Borrowing from organizational studies, he found three broad ways bartenders reconciled the traditions of yesterday with the culture of today: “spanning boundaries,” “discarding symbols,” and “expanding work.”

I’ll spare you the details — which is a backhand way of saying I didn’t wholly understand what he was getting at — but you can read the study yourself if you’re interested. I will give one example. Sato writes of a bartender at a modern bar who has largely abandoned the cocktail shaker and bar spoon. He breaks with tradition by not making the drink in front of the customer — see “discarding symbols” — and instead reaches into a fridge and pulls out a small jar in which he has carefully premade a cocktail. Still, he wears a formal jacket and tie and pours and presents the drink by “intentionally moving gracefully throughout his work,” much like a traditional bartender.

In this way, he attends to modern demands for speed and consistency (showing innovation) while maintaining tradition in his demeanor and approach (providing continuity and trust). It seems to be a bridge that works.

Having read this study, I can’t unsee the effort to span that gap in American craft cocktail bars, although it shows up in different forms. (No surprise: we don’t have the same history of formality as Japanese bars.)

American craft cocktail bars of the past two decades have each found ways to thrill with innovation while comforting with tradition. We’ve seen it in the interior design: dark wood, Edison bulbs, brass footrails (too low to be reached from a bar seat), along with sleeve garters and handlebar mustaches on the first-generation craft bartenders, all suggesting a long and hallowed tradition, even if the place opened just a year ago. (A 19th-century saloon wouldn’t have had barstools, but no contemporary one would be without.) Faux dive bars love vintage beer signs that suggest a genteel slouch toward debauchery. More streamlined, Mad Men-influenced midcentury lounges favor retro Noguchi paper lamps that anchor the space in an era now lost.

The present is also, well, present: contemporary music in the background (Coral Reef’s cover of “Fly Me to the Moon”), modern local art on the walls, and perhaps a Ligne Roset Togo Sofa under thirft store portrait of a 1930s bank president.

But it’s in the cocktails that you can most clearly see the tension between past and present. Many bars serve everything from drinks that would be familar to a 19th-century bartender (old-fashioned!) to those that would deeply baffle him. (Jerry Thomas, resurrected: “Then you add — yes, OK — what is this… fluffy juice?”)

It’s a way to make customers feel grounded in tradition and part of something serious, while still carving out space for innovation.

Classics & Signatures. The classic cocktail list divide.

The most obvious bridge is found on cocktail lists, which are often split between “classics” and “signature” drinks (or sometimes “house” or “original” cocktails).

“Tactically alternating between styles to suit customers reflects the traditional bartender’s essential skill of attentively observing patrons — a hallmark of Japanese bartending, often described as having the ‘eyes of a detective,’” Sato writes. “Mastery of two distinct styles emerges as an extension of conventional practice.”

And tradition finds its way into contemporary drinks, providing ballast and gravity. That’s the basis of the “Mr. Potato Head” method of drink creation popularized by bartender Phil Ward. The Paper Plane emerged from the bourbon sour; the Kingston Negroni swapped out gin for funky rum. Tradition and innovation, now in a coupe.

Bartenders who attempt to mix anything and everything without anchorage in tradition risk inventing the cocktail equivalent of the Cybertruck — something untethered from the past, without dignity, and destined for similar success.